A History of of Conflict

TheIran-IraqWar (1980–88) was a brutal eight-year war between the Tnations of Iran and Iraq. It created terrible upheaval in both countries and revealed divisions among peoples of theMiddle Eastthat would be at the root of major conflicts in the region in the following years. The war pitted Persians, the people of Iran who generally speak Farsi or other Persian languages and have a unique ethnicity, identity, and culture, against Arabs, the people of the Middle East and North Africa who speak Arabic or live in countries in which Arabic is the dominant language. Sunni Muslims (followers of the Sunni branch of the religion of Islam) struggled againstShiites(followers of the Shia branch of Islam). Pan-Arabists (advocates of the unification of Arab peoples and the political alliance of Arab states) opposed Pan-Islamists (advocates of the unification of Muslims under a single Islamic state where Islam provides the basis for political, social, and cultural life). The war also pitted two ambitious authoritarian leaders against one another: Iran's Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900–1989) and Iraq's president Saddam Hussein (1937–2006).

The Iran-Iraq War forced people in both countries to question which form of identity was most important or unifying: their ethnic group, their religious sect (group), or their nationality. On a global level, the war demonstrated the power of other countries to influence the outcome of war in the Middle East. At the national level in Iran and Iraq, however, the war accomplished little or nothing and at great cost. Although the bloody conflict seemed to solidify the idea of nationalism (devotion and loyalty to the nation and its culture), neither Iran or Iraq gained territory from or political authority over the other, and both suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and severely damaged economies.

A history of of conflict

One of the conflicts that led to the Iran-Iraq War was a dispute over the shared border between the two countries. At the heart of this conflict was

WORDS TO KNOW

Arabs:People of the Middle East and North Africa who speak the Arabic language or who live in countries in which Arabic is the dominant language.

ayatollah:A high-ranking Shiite religious leader.

Ba'ath Party:A secular (nonreligious) political party founded in the 1940s with the goal of uniting the Arab world and creating one powerful Arab state.

chemical weapons:Toxic chemical substances used during armed conflict to kill, injure, or incapacitate an enemy.

dynasty:A series of rulers from the same family.

genocide:The deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people based on religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

Islamism:A fundamentalist movement characterized by the belief that Islam should provide the basis for the political, social, and cultural life in Muslim nations.

Kurds:A non-Arab ethnic group who live mainly in present-day Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

mandate:A commission granting one country the authority to administer the affairs of another country. Also describes the territory entrusted to foreign administration.

nationalism:The belief that a people with shared ethnic, cultural, and/or religious identities have the right to form their own nation. In established nations nationalism is devotion and loyalty to the nation and its culture.

Ottoman Empire:The vast empire of the Ottoman Turks which included southwest Asia, northeast Africa, and southeast Europe, and lasted from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century.

Pan-Arabism:A movement for the unification of Arab peoples and the political alliance of Arab states.

Pan-Islamism:A movement for the unification of Muslims under a single Islamic state where Islam provides the basis for political, social, and cultural life.

refugees:People who flee their country to escape violence or persecution.

sharia:A system of Islamic law based on the Koran and other sacred writings. Sharia attempts to create the perfect social order, based on God's will and justice, and covers a wide range of human activities, including acts of religious worship, the law of contracts and obligations, personal status law, and public law.

Shiites:Followers of the Shia branch of Islam. Shiites believe that only direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad are qualified to lead the Islamic faith.

Sunnis:Followers of the Sunni branch of Islam. Sunnis believe that elected officials, regardless of their heritage, are qualified to lead the Islamic faith.

a 120-mile (193-kilometer) river called the Shatt al Arab, which is formed by the joining of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The Shatt al Arab flows past Iraq's port of Basra and the Iranian city of Abadan before entering the Persian Gulf at the Iraqi port of Al Faw. The southern half of the river

forms the long-disputed boundary between Iraq and Iran. The Shatt al Arab is important to both nations; it is Iraq's only access to the Persian Gulf and it provides a strategic waterway for both Iran and Iraq for shipping their oil and other products. Since the seventeenth century, the people of both the region known as Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and the region known by Westerners as Persia (which officially became known as Iran in 1935) a have at times claimed the river, or at least one of its banks, as part of their lands.

The border conflict began anew at the end of World War I (1914–18; a global war between the Allies [Great Britain, France, andRussia, joined later by theUnited States] and the Central Powers [Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies]), when the victorious Allies divided up the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire, the vast empire of the Ottoman Turks which included southwest Asia, northeast Africa, and southeast Europe and lasted from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. Great Britain was granted a mandate (administrative authority) to govern Iraq, and in creating the mandate of Iraq, Britain included some border areas that Iran claimed as its own. When Iraq tried to declare its independence in 1932, Iran refused to recognize it as a nation until these border claims were resolved. Iran and Iraq agreed to a treaty in 1937 that defined their boundaries along the east bank of Shatt al Arab, which favored Iraq. For a time, the treaty brought resolution, but the monarchies that ruled these countries ended in the 1950s. The new rulers were not as willing to submit to the terms of the treaty as the earlier rulers had been.

Problems arose near the end of the 1960s, when the Ba'ath Party, a political party that had originated in Syria, took control of Iraq. The party was secular (nonreligious), and its original objective was to bring about a peaceful unification of Arab nations. The Ba'ath Party leaders of Iraq took the idea to a new level, envisioning Iraq as the central force in the united Arab world of the future. This was disturbing to Iran, since Iran's population is Persian and not Arab. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980), the shah of Iran, did not want a powerful union ofArab countriesso close to Iran.

With this hostility already festering, the shah demanded that the boundaries along the Shatt al Arab be changed in Iran's favor. In order to pressure theIraqisto agree to his terms, the shah began to interfere in Iraq's internal problems with the Kurds, a non-Arab ethnic group who lived along Iraq's northern border. The Kurds had been fighting for self-rule within Iraq since the 1920s. In the mid–1970s the Kurds began attacking Iraqi targets in an attempt to gain self-rule. In retaliation the

Iraqi government began an organized effort to drive the Kurds living along the Iran-Iraq border out of the country. Much to the dismay of Iraq, Iran began to support the Kurds, providing them with weapons, safe refuge, and other types of aid and support, within its borders. (It is important to note, however, that Iran had its own population of Kurds who also wanted self-rule, and Iran did not support their efforts or grant them self-rule.)

Under these pressures, the two governments decided to negotiate. In 1975 Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement, in which Iran agreed to end its aid to the Iraqi Kurds and Iraq gave up full control of the Shatt al Arab. According to the agreement, the boundary between Iran and Iraq would be in the center of the Shatt al Arab. Each country would have

rights to one bank and its half of the river. But this agreement would soon prove to be unstable.

Borders and Kurds were not the only sources of friction between Iran and Iraq. A new political movement arising in Iran would significantly add to the hostility. Starting in the 1960s, Iranian Muslim religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began to encourage Iran to isolate itself from the rest of the world. He protested against modern, and, specifically, Western values. Many Iranians disliked the control that foreign powers had over the shah. During the years following World War II, Iran's oil industry had been controlled by British and American companies and the Soviet Union had begun to support Iranian Communist groups that were trying to overthrow the shah. (Communists are advocates of Communism, a system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single political party holds power.) In 1953, in an effort to regain control of Iranian resources and government, Iran's prime minister led an uprising in which he seized control of Iran's oil industry and forced the shah into exile. The United States, however, had been unwilling to lose control in Iran, particularly given the Soviet Union's interest in the country and the U.S. interest in its oil. The United States helped a small group of Iranians stage a coup (overthrow of the government) that returned the shah to power in 1954. After that, the shah was one of the United States' strongest allies in the Middle East. Throughout his rule, the United States supplied Iran with billions of dollars' worth of military equipment, in the hope of deterring the Soviet Union's power in the region, and had bought billions of dollars of Iranian oil.

Khomeini declared that in modernizing Iran, the shah had created policies that went against the teachings of Islam and ancient Persian tradition. Khomeini felt that the power and influence of foreigners in Iran were damaging to the dignity of the Iranian people. He was especially disgusted by the preferential treatment given to American soldiers in Iran. In 1964, a new law was enacted that gave U.S. military personnel and their families immunity from Iranian criminal laws. According to Robin Wright inDreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, Khomeini thought that Americans were given these freedoms in Iran because the United States had just loaned the shah's government $200 million. As quoted by Wright, Khomeini remarked: “; If the shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him. … Are we to be trampled underfoot by the boots of

America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars?” For his outspoken criticism of the shah, Khomeini was arrested and in 1964 he was forced into exile. First exiled to Turkey, he soon moved to Iraq, where for the next thirteen years he continued to preach hisoppositionto the shah and his government.

During the years when Khomeini was exiled in Iraq, Shiites formed the majority, at about 60 percent of that country's population, but Iraq's ruling Ba'ath Party was made up of Sunni Muslims. Khomeini, who was a charismatic figure and a Shiite, began to develop a strong following among the Iraqi Shiites. He was also open in his criticism of the high-ranking Ba'ath Party member Saddam Hussein, who was then in charge of Iraq's internal security. Khomeini called him an infidel (unbeliever). Saddam was so concerned about Khomeini's perceived power that he had him driven out of Iraq in 1978.

Saddam comes to power

Saddam had joined the Ba'ath Party in his youth. Even in his early years as a Ba'athist, Saddam envisioned himself as the leader of a pan-Arab country. When Saddam was only twenty-two, the Ba'ath Party assigned him to help in the assassination of Iraq's military leader, which failed. After other secret and often violent missions, Saddam emerged in the 1960s in a high position within the party. By the late 1960s, as the head of Iraq's internal security, he began to use the system to purge the country of all enemies of the Ba'ath Party by having them driven out of the country, imprisoned, or killed. By the late 1970s Saddam had also begun to ruthlessly eliminate members of his own party who he perceived as rivals to his political ambitions.

Saddam became president of Iraq in July 1979. Once he had taken office, he ordered the executions by firing squad of hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath Party members and officers of the Iraqi military—anyone he thought might threaten his power in Iraq. He ruled as the absolute dictator of Iraq, brutally eliminating those who threatened to oppose him. Once in power, he set his sights on expanding his realm. The Soviet Union had been an ally of Iraq's for decades, and had supplied it with enough weapons to enable a powerful assault on its neighbors when the time seemed right.

Khomeini comes to power

The same year that Saddam became president, 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran. It was a time of great upheaval. The monarchy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Pahlavi dynasty (series of rulers from the same family) that had transformed Persia into the modern state of Iran starting in 1925, was collapsing. The shah had modernized and secularized Iran, creating a wealthy class. He led a secular government and was his rule was heavily influenced, in terms of culture, politics, and economy, by the West. But many Iranians, especially the devotedly religious and the poor who had not benefited from the new economy, feared that their traditions, values, and Persian identity were being wiped away by modernization and the shah's allegiance to the Western world.